The Jane Mansbridge Research Award Winners 2016

In its fifteenth year, the Jane Mansbridge Research Award is presented at HKS Class Day for an outstanding research papers (PAEs, SYPAs, etc.) whose analysis of an organization or topic is focused on some aspect of women or gender.

This award is named in honor of Jane Mansbridge, the Adams Professor of Political Leadership and Democratic Values at Harvard Kennedy School. Professor Mansbridge is a WAPPP affiliated faculty member and has been instrumental in fostering, conducting, and promoting gender-related research as well as changing the face of power at the Harvard Kennedy School through her portraiture project.

This year, our faculty selection committee was impressed by the rigor of all nominations saying, “They bring new information into the world and make practical recommendations to advance the cause of gender equality.” From this impressive group, they found two truly exceptional PAEs. And the winners are:


Gender Equality in the Mexican Foreign Service by Tania Del Rio, nominated by Hannah Riley Bowles

Partnerships in Investigating Sex Trafficking: Bridging Gaps to Support Survivors by Caitlin Ryan and Deena Zeplowitz, nominated by Julie Wilson.

About the papers:

Tania Del Rio’s “Gender Equality in the Mexican Foreign Service” is an original and thought-provoking study of the barriers facing women in the Mexican foreign service, along with immediate steps that can reduce those barriers. This careful analysis used three sources: an existing survey of professionals in the foreign service; in depth interviews with members of the service; and an original database compiled for this study that, for 844 foreign service officers, includes demographic information as well as the scores for each element of the promotion exams that the officer had taken since 2002, posts to which each officer had been assigned, and the date of each promotion. The study reveals different obstacles at different stages. At the earliest entrance stage, Del Rio demonstrates potential biases both in the content of written exams and in the process of in-person interviews. At the second stage, she finds significant differences in postings to highly responsible positions and to “hardship post,” both of which count significantly for future promotions. The steps she recommends for de-biasing the exams and interviews and for rethinking the postings are practical and politically feasible.

Caitlin Ryan and Deena Zeplowitz’s “Partnerships in Investigating Sex Trafficking: Bridging Gaps to Support Survivors” investigates programs for reducing sex trafficking in four cities – Boston, New York, San Francisco, and Seattle. Based on interviews with practitioners in all four cities as well as on existing case studies and government documents in each city, the study takes as its focus the problems of foreign-born women who are the victims and survivors of trafficking, particularly those employed in one common venue: illicit massage parlors. The twelve recommendations for action around which the study is organized reveal sensitivity to many points of view – particularly necessary because the authors argue that the government and non-profit agencies concerned with trafficking need to work in coalition. Thus the coalition members need to recognize their differences and find common ground on tactics and intended outcomes even while disagreeing on ideology, theories of causality, and other central issues. Law enforcement officers have different incentives and training from both government workers in family courts and service agencies, and from the voluntary members of the NGOs that engage in work to prevent sex trafficking. A serious approach to these differences informs almost all of the study’s recommendations, including identifying a neutral third-party organization to manage the coalition and establishing clear boundaries between agencies regarding roles and responsibilities. The study recognizes the victims’ and survivors’ own different responses to trauma, need for housing and employment, fear of deportation, fear of the police, and fear of retaliation to themselves and their families in their home countries. Because it is so sensitive to the subtleties of the facts on the ground, this study has produced some highly useful recommendations.



Congratulations!!!

Education or Marriage? In Mexico, Gender Often Decides - WAPPP Seminar Series

The Woman: Katja Kaufmann, WAPPP Fellow, Assistant Professor, Department of Economics and IGIER, Bocconi University, Italy

The Talk: Educational Choices and Subjective Expectations of Returns: Evidence on Intra-Household Decisions and Gender Differences

The Question: Why do teenagers in developing countries decide to go to scho

ol, and is your decision based on whether you're a girl or a boy?

Policymakers interested in closing the gender gap in schools, pay attention. A new paper on why students in Mexico decide to pursue higher education may hold key answers to how men and women invest in their futures - and why marriage doesn't seem to be the answer anymore.

A paper penned by Katja Kaufmann and the economist Orazio Attanasio last year studied the decision-making process of families in Mexico deciding

to send their children to high school and college. The team was curious to see if expectations of making more money by getting a better job with a higher level of education mattered more for young men or women, and if education had begun to replace marriage for females seeking a stable future.

The Results: When it comes to boys attending high school, their decision -- as well as that of their parents, matters. Boys are more likely to enter their senior year of high school if the family supports their decision. Attending college, on the other hand, depends on the boys themselves: hopes for a good job and higher pay drives many to pursue higher degree.

Girls, however, seem ruled by a maternal hand. Whether girls enter high school or college largely depends on a mother's opinion, and whether potential marriage prospects outweigh the benefits of earning an extra

degree. (The influence of fathers, meanwhile, was not directly studied. One-fourth of the participants came from mother-only families, making it hard to control for the role that paternal decision-making plays.)

Twist: While girls may forego college opportunities for marriage, they are also more likely to go to college if they live in a region where there aren't many educated men. Greater potential for an educated mate, or the safety of attaining better working opportunities as a single woman, drive many to attend college.

Take away: Ms Kaufmann was surprised by her findings; education has improved tremendously in Mexico over the past few decades, and opportunities are equally available for boys and girls. She wasn't expecting such a strong influence from mothers on their daughter's education, nor the gender imbalance when it came to making decisions. It would be interesting, she said, to run the same study in a different context, such as the United States.

For policymakers, such findings may have an impact on the design of programs aimed at increasing school enrollment by awarding cash or fellowship grants to students.

Oportunidades, for instance, a social assistance program in Mexico for the poor, is considering the possibility of issuing schooling grants directly to students. This paper could inform how such grants are awarded if it is indeed true that teenagers play a constructive, decisive role

in enrolling and attending school.

*Photos courtesy of poster.4teachers.org and http://www.oportunidades.gob.mx/Portal/

Effie-Michelle Metallidis is a guest student blogger for the Women and Public Policy Program and Master in Public Policy first-year student at Harvard Kennedy School.